Michael Powers, the developer behind Trsst, a project that aims to build a secure and decentralized alternative to Twitter. Photo: Father John P. Mosimann

Michael Powers wants to do what so many others have failed to do: build an online social network that’s outside the grip of any one company — and that people like you will actually use.

We’ve seen countless underground hackers build decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter over the years, but so far these open source contraptions have failed to attract anything close to the number of people who use Facebook and Twitter and other commercial services almost constantly. But Powers, a serial entrepreneur based in Washington, D.C., thinks he can finally crack the code.

His project is called Trsst, a name that’s meant to engender a sense of trust, and after a summer when NSA leaker Edward Snowden opened the curtain on modern government surveillance, the Trsst message is particularly timely. “The PRISM revelations have made people more concerned about privacy and security,” Powers says. “So now is the time to give people an alternative.”

‘The PRISM revelations have made people more concerned about privacy and security. So now is the time to give people an alternative’

— Michael Powers

Yes, the tool will broadcast public messages a la Twitter, but it will also encrypt private messages, and it will authenticate public messages so you can rest assured they’re coming from who they say they’re coming from. The big point, however, is that this tool won’t sit on computer servers run by a single company, making things more difficult for government surveillance programs in the vein of PRISM.

Powers is asking for $48,000 on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to make this plan a reality. If completed, Trsst will look kinda like the love-child of a Twitter client and Google Reader — something that lets you post your own stream of consciousness to the web but also read all sorts of online feeds streaming in from elsewhere.

You wouldn’t need your own server to run the software. The idea is that multiple, competing providers will offer Trsst services, much like different companies offer email services today. These services would all work together. If you were on one service, you could still follow someone posting to another — and vice versa — in much the same way two people with different email service providers can send each other messages.

But this dream is still distant. $48,000 in Kickstarter funding is a lot to ask for such a project, given how many others have tried similar services in the past. The most famous is Diaspora, which raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter in 2010, and even it was never more than a ghost town. It was hard to convince anyone to come to a place where they’re weren’t any people.

To solve the ghost-town paradox, Powers is following the Indie Web model, ensuring that Trsst plays nicely with the major social networks, rather than trying to compete with them. By using the standard news feed format Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, Trsst will let you subscribe to existing publications and blogs, including all Tumblr blogs. But it would also double as Twitter client — or at least let you post to Twitter.

“[Twitter compatibility] is not part of the spec, but definitely part of the vision,” Powers says. “Each of our users could connect to Twitter and authorize us to post and read their tweets.”

The idea of building an RSS-based Twitter alternative is hardly new. Powers was inspired by an essay by Dave Winer, one of the first bloggers and the creator of RSS. But it wasn’t until Edward Snowden leaked documents about the NSA’s PRISM program that Powers decided to build the thing.

Although Powers hopes to make the system as easy to use as Twitter, it includes some pretty geeky tools under the hood, including many that provide added security. For example, all “direct messages” sent through Trsst will be encrypted, and all messages can be “signed” so that you’ll know the messages are authentic and haven’t been tampered with.

It’s important to note, however, that nothing offers perfect privacy. Rainey Reitman, the director of the activism team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that common email encryption systems may keep the contents of messages protected, but they might expose other information, such as when and to whom messages were sent. Other tools, such as the OffTheRecord chat system or The New Yorker’s DeadDrop file-sharing system, may be better for some tasks.

‘I’m worried they’re trying to build too much all at once. Security is extremely hard to get right and you need to vet a design like this’

— Brett Slatkin

Others worry about trying to bolt encryption systems onto existing systems like RSS. “I’m happy it’s focused on decentralized and federated communication, because that is essential for spreading out risk,” says Brett Slatkin, an engineer at Google and co-developer of the open source cloud storage system Camlistore. “I’m worried they’re trying to build too much all at once. Security is extremely hard to get right and you need to vet a design like this.”

But Powers is at least starting in the right place. Trsst is more of a protocol than a piece of software. It’s an extension to existing standards, a system for sending messages between autonomous servers. “It’s not rocket science. It’s basic 10-year-old technology, but it’s about how you combine them,” he says.

That may leave you wondering why he needs $48,000 to build it. Powers says the main reason he’s raising money is not to pay his salary — though he does have quite a bit of technical work to do, even if he is drawing on older work. He says he’s raising funds because he wants to make sure there’s really a demand for a system like Trsst.